Thursday, February 28, 2013

The man who represents the 27 leaders of the European Union warned Thursday of widespread opposition to steps that may be necessary to keep Britain as a member of the bloc.

Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, said he saw “no impending need to open the E.U. treaties” to address the complaints of countries like Britain that are outside the euro zone and that object to “federal Euroland” rules governing the bloc.

“Nor do I feel much appetite for it around the leaders’ table,” Mr. Van Rompuy said in a speech he delivered Thursday evening
in London at the Policy Network, a center-left research organization.

David Cameron suffered a humiliating defeat in the Eastleigh by-election in the early hours of this morning after his party was beaten into third place by the Liberal Democrats and Ukip.

The Lib Dems took the seat with a reduced majority of 1,771 while the Conservative candidate Maria Hutchings won just a quarter of the votes cast.

But the night’s real success story was Ukip which had its best ever Westminster election result. Its candidate Diane James increased her party’s share of the vote from 3.6 per cent in 2010 to 27.8 per cent.

At least 22 people were killed in a series of blasts in Shi'ite neighborhoods of Baghdad on Thursday, police sources said, as Iraq's precarious sectarian balance comes under growing strain.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Sunni Muslim insurgents have been redoubling their efforts to undermine the Shi'ite-led government and spark deeper intercommunal fighting since the start of the year.

Two car bombs, one parked near a crowded restaurant and the other close to a football stadium, exploded around sunset and killed at least 18 people in Baghdad's southern Shula district.

Cyprus's new President Nicos Anastasiades vowed on Thursday to work for a swift conclusion of a bailout for the cash-starved island, ruling out debt or deposit "haircuts" for the Mediterranean nation threatened with a financial meltdown.

Economic turmoil engulfing Cyprus, one of the euro zone's smallest economies, could test the European Union's mettle in a crisis threatening to spill beyond the tiny island's shores and unravel nascent recovery in the bloc.

The President of the European Council warned David Cameron on Thursday that Europe would not prioritise treaty change despite the British prime minister’s desire for a new settlement to put to a referendum.

Speaking in the City of London, Herman Van Rompuy said the most “drastic” changes for the EU were over and reform would now be in “steps” rather than “leaps into the unknown”.

“In the last three years we’ve had major changes without major treaty revision so I see no impending need to open the EU treaties,” he said in his speech on Thursday evening. “Nor do I feel much appetite for it around the leaders’ table.”

Vice President Joe Biden’s fondness for his shotguns has been documented by the Washington Free Beacon, and he continued to promote the use of these dangerous weapons in an interview with the outdoor website, Field and Stream.

F&S: What about the other uses, for self-defense and target practice?

BIDEN: Well, the way in which we measure it is—I think most scholars would say—is that as long as you have a weapon sufficient to be able to provide your self-defense. I did one of these town-hall meetings on the Internet and one guy said, “Well, what happens when the end days come? What happens when there’s the earthquake? I live in California, and I have to protect myself.”

I said, “Well, you know, my shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15, because you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.”

Bob Woodward isn't the only person who's received threats for airing the Obama administration's dirty laundry. It seems anyone is a potential target of the White House these days - even former senior members of the Clinton administration.

A day after Woodward's claim that a senior White House official had told him he would "regret" writing a column criticizing President Obama's stance on the sequester, Lanny Davis, a longtime close advisor to President Bill Clinton, told WMAL's Mornings on the Mall Thursday he had received similar threats for newspaper columns he had written about Obama in the Washington Times.

Davis told WMAL that his editor, John Solomon, "received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn't like some of my columns, even though I'm a supporter of Obama. I couldn't imagine why this call was made." Davis says the Obama aide told Solomon, "that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials."

The meteorite that crashed on Russia was hit by an unidentified flying object causing it to explode and shatter over the Urals, it has been claimed.

The bizarre theory is based on analysis of blurry footage of the space rock as it streaked across morning sky above the city of Chelyabinsk.

U.F.O enthusiasts insist a small 'object' can be seen colliding with the meteorite on its trajectory through the atmosphere, despite the fact there were no reports of Russia launching missiles to down the celestial intruder, they claim.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning doctors to be on the lookout for an untreatable multidrug-resistant 'superbug' emerging in the U.S.

The 'superbug' springs from a bacteria called Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriacea, 15 types of which have been seen in the U.S. in the last year. The unique bacteria can cause pneumonia, intestinal and urinary tract infections, and bloodstream infections.

In one outbreak at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, seven deaths were attributed to the 'superbug' after a New York Woman who came to the hospital for a lung transplant while infected.

The veteran comedian made a joke about the Holocaust on Monday's Fashion Police show on E! when reviewing the low-cut shimmering gold dress worn by the German beauty. 'The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing Jews into the ovens', said he 79-year-old, before doubling over with laughter.

Thousands of Bank of Ireland and Bristol & West borrowers customers face a doubling of interest on mortgage interest payments this year after the banks decided to ramp up tracker rates.

Buy-to-let borrowers are being hit by a bigger hike than residential customers: they will see their mortgage rate jump to 4.49 per cent on top of Bank of England base rate - or 4.99 per cent compared to the current rate of 2.25 per cent (base rate plus 1.75 per cent).

Residential customers were also paying 2.25 per cent but face a smaller hike, to 2.99 per cent (base rate plus 2.49) on 1 May 2013. But the tracker rate will then increase again to 4.49 per cent (base rate plus 3.99 per cent) from 1 October 2013.

Mick Philpott and his wife Mairead, pictured above with a friend, and another friend Paul Mosley are alleged to have acted out how they would save the youngsters from the property in Allenton, Derby, once the fire took hold. Mr Mosley's nephew's girlfriend told the court that Philpott had been 'going on about wanting a bigger house'.

A fourth person has died in hospital from injuries sustained in a shooting at a Swiss wood processing plant near the city of Lucerne, police said on Thursday.

A 42-year-old factory worker opened fire on co-workers with a Sphinx AT 380 pistol on Wednesday, killing two colleagues and wounding seven others. The gunman was also found dead at the scene but police have given no details on how he died.

Police said they were still investigating how the weapon came into the man's possession and the motive for the attack.

The scientists call it a "brain link," and it is the closest anyone has gotten to a real-life "mind meld": the thoughts of a rat romping around a lab in Brazil were captured by electronic sensors and sent via Internet to the brain of a rat in the United States.

The result: the second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior, researchers reported on Thursday in Scientific Reports, a journal of the Nature Publishing Group.

A Bangladeshi Islamist party leader was sentenced to death on Thursday over abuses carried out during the country's independence war, triggering riots that killed at least 30 people.

Delwar Hossain Sayedee, 73, vice-president of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was found guilty by Bangladesh's war crimes tribunal of mass killing, rape, arson, looting and forcing minority Hindus to convert to Islam during the 1971 war of separation from Pakistan, lawyers and tribunal officials said.

After he was convicted and sentenced, police clashed with activists from Sayedee's party and violence raged in more than a dozen areas around the country, police, witnesses and media reports said.

At least three policemen were among the dead and around 300 were wounded, they added.

Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a "very senior person" at the White House warned him in an email that he would "regret doing this," the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.

CNN host Wolf Blitzer said that the network invited a White House official to debate Woodward on-air, but the White House declined.

"It makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'You're going to regret doing something that you believe in,'" Woodward said.

Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a "very senior person" at the White House warned him in an email that he would "regret doing this," the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.

CNN host Wolf Blitzer said that the network invited a White House official to debate Woodward on-air, but the White House declined.

"It makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'You're going to regret doing something that you believe in,'" Woodward said.

An Army private charged over the biggest leak of classified material in US history is set to tell a military judge how he did it and why.

Private Bradley Manning will answer questions later on Thursday from the judge who is considering whether to accept his offer to plead guilty to some lesser charges.

His only public explanation until now for giving the secret documents to Julian Assange's anti-secrecy WikiLeaks website can be found in logs of an online chat with a confidant-turned-government informant.

Police searching for a missing mother-of-three who vanished while suffering post-natal depression have found a body.

Karen Simpson, 31, disappeared from her home in the village of Burscough, near Ormskirk, Lancashire, on Sunday morning when she went to a local Tesco store leaving her three-month-old girl with relatives and never returned.

She had told family members that she needed to 'clear her head.'

The force said the death was not being treated as suspicious at this stage.

With its gold leaf and marble décor, duplex suites, heliport and fleet of Rolls-Royces, the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai is hailed as the most luxurious in the world, a seven-star monument to wealth and extravagance.

To stay there will cost you £2,000 a night. Just to have dinner means parting with a huge deposit per person before you even get to the table. Nor can you simply wander in off the street into the lobby to gaze at the Turkish carpets and watch the fountain play — the Burj rests on its own artificial island.

So who can afford to stay there? Increasingly, the answer is the world’s fast-growing army of multi-millionaires from China.

The US military and its coalition in Afghanistan have acknowledged a miscount of Taliban attacks in the country last year, citing a clerical error as the likely reason for the false data - which Washington has already used.

In January, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan boasted a roughly seven per cent drop in attacks by Taliban forces in Afghanistan in 2012, but as the Associated Press has learned, the level of “enemy-initiated attacks” actually remained the same.

“During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan,” ISAF spokesman Jamie Graybeal said Tuesday. Graybeal attributed the flaw to a clerical error, adding that it does not change the overall assessment of the situation in Afghanistan.

A copy of a report written by EU heads of mission in Jerusalem and Ramallah condemns recent Israeli settlement building and recommends that EU member states place economic sanctions on settlements, AFP reported on Wednesday.

The report referred to Israel's settlement construction in east Jerusalem as "systematic, deliberate and provocative" and stated that Jewish settlement construction was "the biggest single threat to the two state solution."

A police investigation is underway tonight into the death of an injured climber during an RAF rescue operation on Ben Nevis.

The Ministry of Defence described as “speculation” reports that Mark Phillips plunged hundreds of feet to his death after a safety line was severed before he was securely on board a helicopter that had been sent to take him to hospital.

The 51-year-old environmental health officer and father of one had earlier fallen while on a climbing expedition with friends in the Raeburn Buttress area of the UK’s highest mountain. He is the 11th climber to die in the Scottish Highlands this winter.

Speaking in Latvia, where he was appearing at the Northern Future Forum conference, the Prime Minister described the claims about the Lib Dem peer as “serious” and said that the Liberal Democrats need to “get to the bottom” of the allegations.

Speaking to journalists in Riga, Mr Cameron was asked whether he has “confidence in the way the deputy Prime Minister has handled” the Lord Rennard claims.

Mr Cameron said: “Obviously these are serious issues and serious matters and they need to be taken seriously.

Some oyster beds in Plaquemines Parish have been closed by the state Department of Health and Hospitals and Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries after a crew boat sheared an inactive wellhead, causing an oil spill. A 42-foot crewboat struck a sealed wellhead Tuesday night, releasing oily water into the shallow water of Lake Grande Ecaille Bay, nine miles southwest of Port Sulphur, the Coast Guard said.

Oyster beds in Area 11 will remain closed indefinitely until it is determined the oysters are safe to eat, according to DHH Secretary Bruce Greenstein.

According to the U.S. Coast Guard, a crew boat on Tuesday night sheared an inactive wellhead in Area 11, causing the oil spill. It was also reported that the well is spewing less than 20 barrels a day. The well has been out of service for five years.

Heavy rain, snow and hail brought another round of destruction in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) and the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (Fata), leaving at least 12 dead and over 25 injured in various incidents across the region.

Many roads were rendered unusable, much to the consternation of both pedestrians and motorists. Heavy rainfall and snowfall was recorded in Malam Jabba, Kalam, and Dir. Upper Dir was particularly affected with five feet of snowfall accompanied by heavy downpour disrupting routine life.

In Pir Sadai, Mardan, the roof of Saeed’s house collapsed, killing his son Zahid and injuring his other son Abid. They were rushed to the Mardan District Headquarters Hospital.

Lassa fever has claimed the lives of eight people in Jega local government area of Kebbi State, while three others are still undergoing medical treatment at the Federal Medical Centre (FMC), Birnin Kebbi.

A nurse at the FMC, Birnin Kebbi, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they received the case on Wednesday Feb. 28, 2013, and that three people were confirmed dead on the spot while two others died the following day.

He further explained that, on Friday, five people were brought from the same local government and one died in the night, another one passed away the following day while the remaining three people are still undergoing medical treatment.

A hot water heater in the south building of the Johns Hopkins Hospital facility on Kewsick Road was the source of an illness that sent 17 people to the emergency room, according to city and state health officials.

Officials said the water heater was the source of nitrates that made their way into hot water service in the building’s north half.

Elevated nitrates, according to a news release, can cause dizziness, nausea, breathing difficulty and vomiting. Officials said those who were sick had been discharged from the hospital.

The bloodbath on Britain's high streets has accelerated dramatically with the rate of major chain store closures increasing ten-fold, hitting 20 per day in 2012.

Analysis by PwC and the Local Data Company found that year-on-year, the net reduction in the number of stores climbed from 174 closures in 2011 to 1,779 closures in 2012 with the pace intensifying even further since.

A combination of factors - from the consumer spending squeeze to poor business models - is being blamed.